Things Go Flying (10 page)

He could tell she didn't believe him. But he wasn't going to tell
her
that his dead mother had just been trying to speak to him; Audrey was just looking for some reason to take him back to the hospital. He stared her down, and watched her return to the kitchen, her back stiff.

He didn't want to let Audrey take him back to the hospital, because he didn't want to be labelled insane. He wasn't hallucinating, he was communicating with the dead, like his mother before him. Perhaps the knock on the head had precipitated it, but he doubted it. It probably would have happened anyway, the way it had happened to his mother—out of the blue. He had her gift, and if there was ever a gift he wanted to return, it was this one.

He was terrified.

“Harold, phone for you,” Audrey called from the kitchen.

“Who is it?” Harold pretended to be put out, but really, he was grateful to be hauled back into the land of the living. He'd even talk to a telephone solicitor right now, given the chance.

“I think it's about the car.”

The car.

The car, last he'd heard, was still lying in pieces all over Jimmy's shop floor. Apparently, like all hostage negotiations, these things took time. The insurance company had agreed to pay Jimmy for his estimate— his time and his storage fees—and to pay for the approved auto shop, Al's Auto, to tow it back to their place to do their estimate.

“We didn't get it,” Al said.

“What do you mean, you didn't get it?” Harold knew that Al had gone over that afternoon with his tow-truck to pick up Harold's car, which had been hastily slapped back together, he presumed, by Jimmy, in order to be taken apart again and fixed by Al. Harold began to understand why insurance was so expensive—the whole system ran a lot like the government, with the vast pool of numberless individuals paying in the end. So really, there was no upper limit.

It seemed Jimmy had refused to release the car anyway—probably out of spite for having lost out on the work—shutting up his doors for the day just as the tow-truck arrived. “We'll go back tomorrow,” Al said, like he did this all the time, “but you better come down.”

When Harold hung up the phone, annoyed at having to go to the garage in the morning—and frankly alarmed at the thought of a spiteful mechanic having his hands deep in the guts of his car—he saw Audrey hovering, eyes wide, as if she expected him to collapse from the stress of the phone call.

That was it, Harold decided—he was going back to work tomorrow. Maybe it was Audrey that was making him crazy.

• • •

B
Y THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, Audrey was ready for Harold to go back to work too. He insisted he was fine, and he seemed fine, physically, anyway. He was eating and walking normally—no signs of staggering, no evidence of dizzy spells—and his eyes tracked her finger the way they should—a test she'd seen the Emergency doctor do and which she insisted on performing three times a day, even though Dylan rolled his eyes whenever he saw her do it. And she hadn't caught Harold talking to himself again after that first time.

The truth was she needed him functioning. She'd begun to reclaim his identity, following the instructions in the helpful pamphlet
What to do if you've been the Victim of Identity Theft
, which the banker had left with them, while Harold struggled manfully with his newspaper. She'd contacted the fraud departments of the major credit bureaus and requested that a fraud alert be placed in Harold's file; she'd ordered copies of his credit reports; she'd contacted the credit card companies again, the phone company, and everybody bloody else she could think of. She'd filed a police report. But this was going to be a protracted process—she couldn't do it all by herself.

Also, she had to get Harold out of the house. She had things to do, and she needed to think, and she could never think unless the house was empty.

So she executed the usual essentially thankless and hectic morning routine, waking everyone, putting the coffee on, preparing healthy lunches and packing them in brown paper bags—the boys would probably throw theirs in the trash and buy french fries, but she couldn't think about that, it made her just crazy—putting a reasonably nutritious breakfast on the table, going back upstairs to wake Dylan a second time when yelling at him from downstairs didn't work, stopping on demand to locate John's homework, and running downstairs to the basement between bites of toast to take Dylan's basketball shirt out of the dryer, all while making a mental note to get milk, pick Dylan up after the game, and—there was something else she had to do today, but she couldn't for the life of her remember what it was.

Sometimes, to keep herself together and serene in the mornings, she would put the small, tinny radio in the kitchen on to a classical station while she performed her menial but nevertheless important and carefully timed tasks, and if the kids were annoying her—if they weren't getting up, or if they left wet towels on the bathroom floor— she would turn the music up a little. It was her way of refusing to be drawn. She'd think about her beautiful, functional ballet—Audrey adored classical music—and flit about the kitchen in her invisible musical bubble, twirling from counter to fridge, pirouetting with a full coffee pot, shutting a bottom cupboard with a pointed toe. The rest of the family found this embarrassing.

Today the music was especially loud, because she'd lost it after all and finally stormed up the stairs and hauled Dylan's blankets off and told him that if he didn't get up
right now
he could just forget about getting picked up after his basketball game.

When Dylan finally came to the breakfast table, Harold and John were already eating their toast, Harold reading the obituaries, and John catatonically studying the back of a cereal box. The music was sufficiently loud that conversation was impractical. Nevertheless, Audrey distinctly heard Dylan mutter, “Nurse Ratched's at it again.”

Nobody touched the fresh fruit she'd put out.
Why did she bother?

She remembered the other thing she had to do today—find a birthday present for Harold. She'd gone off the power tool idea completely.

• • •

A
UDREY WASN'T A
computer whiz, but she wasn't a complete Neanderthal either. She knew how to do a basic Google search. Once she was alone in the house, Audrey went downstairs to the basement and got on the family computer and looked up “ecstasy.” No one would ever know. An hour later, she was more informed—and more worried than ever.

She decided things couldn't get much worse so she typed in “paternity tests” and hit Search. And while she was waiting for the results (but really the results were instantaneous, so it was more that she was procrastinating about reading them) she remembered how she'd allowed herself to be seduced by Tom Grossman. How weak she had been!

Back when Audrey still had legs like a dancer's and her head was full of romantic, fanciful ideas, she'd fallen, very temporarily, for the particular appeal of Dr. Tom Grossman.

She was just under thirty, the mother of a toddler. And that was probably part of it too, the child being as good a constant reminder as any that her girlhood—the time before anything had been decided— was over.

They'd have dinner, Tom and his wife, Adele, and she and Harold, at each other's houses—in this very house—enjoyable dinner parties when everything still seemed possible, before everyone's lives seemed to go down certain paths, before, in Tom and Adele's case, way led on to way. They'd sit at the dining room table, the lights low after a good meal, the wine flowing, while Tom entertained them—talking in grandiose terms (the world was always his oyster), making them laugh with his outrageous anecdotes—and then she'd look across the table at Harold.

CHAPTER SIX

H
arold was at Staples after work, staring sightlessly at a bunch of shredders, thinking instead about what had happened at the garage that morning.

He'd arranged to meet Al at Jimmy's East End Auto at 8 am. Harold had been early and had sat in his parked rental car outside on the street, reluctant to go in before Al arrived with his tow-truck. The garage looked the same as every other garage Harold had ever seen that wasn't part of a chain—run down, with old tires everywhere, and hand-painted signs. He could see a mechanic in a jumpsuit moving around inside one of the bays. Harold kept his eyes open for Roy's tow-truck—it was black and shiny, he remembered, with the Playboy symbol in white on its mud flaps.

Al hauled up in his tow-truck and pulled into the yard. Harold knew it was Al because “Al's Auto” was painted on the side. Harold left his car on the street and crossed the road to join Al as he got out of his truck. Harold feared that his car really was still in pieces and that Al wouldn't be able to tow it away, and then what would he do?

But he drew strength from Al immediately. He was a big man, with dirty jeans and a cowboy's swagger and dark grease so deeply embedded in his fingers that Harold was grateful that he didn't offer to shake hands.

“Harold?” Al said. Harold nodded. “Let's go get her.”

Al slammed his truck door and headed straight into the garage. Harold followed behind him and a little to the left, sheltering behind Al's bulk.

“Hey, Jimmy!” Al yelled.

“Jimmy's not here,” said the lone mechanic, who was tinkering with a car on the hoist.

“No more bullshit,” Al said, pleasantly. “We've come for the Camry.”

“She's out back,” the mechanic said, and turned back to the car overhead. “Get her yourself.”

“That was almost too easy,” Al muttered to Harold, as they turned and headed for the fenced yard in the back. Harold glanced back over his shoulder at the mechanic and saw that he was grinning.

It took them a few minutes to locate Harold's car, because it was boxed in on all sides by junked trucks, vans, and SUVS, all of which were taller than Harold's less fashionable sedan.

“Jesus fuckin' Christ,” Al said, when he'd climbed up onto the hood of a Jeep and from there to its roof and stood looking down at the car. “They went to a lot of trouble.”

Harold stood on the ground looking up at Al and had to see for himself. He began to climb up beside him, careful not to split his pants. He was dressed for the office. Al had to give him a hand up, and it was awkward, but finally he stood on the Jeep's roof beside Al.

Al snorted out his nose. “At least it's in one piece.”

But Harold was horrified. He looked down at the twisted wreckage, the front of his car all smashed in, fervently grateful that he still had his son.

Al began to rant that it would take him a goddamned half-hour to move all the vehicles to get at the goddamned car, and that he sure as hell hoped Jimmy would show up by then, and Harold decided to flee, saying he had to get to work.

Now, Harold hesitated over his choice of shredders. The crosscut shredders were best, he'd been told. But which one? The bigger the better? He thought of Darwin, thought of getting his hand caught in a crosscut shredder and bleeding to death in the basement . . . but no, look, there was a safety shut-off.

Depressed, he thought about how he came to be here, at the midpoint of his life, taking the optimistic view, or perhaps near the end of his life, taking the pessimistic view, staring at shredders in Staples. The theft of his identity had brought home to him that he seemed to have no identity worth mentioning.

He had no idea what he wanted. He had no idea who he was. He'd always treated life as something to be avoided, rather than embraced. Maybe that was why he felt so empty. This, for Harold, was an epiphany, a potentially life-changing moment, but his thoughts were interrupted.

“Can I help you?” asked a young girl who obviously worked there.

“I don't think so,” Harold said glumly.

But she was persistent, and kind. “If it's a shredder you want, I can tell you what the best deal is.”

He allowed himself to be helped to the most expensive shredder they sold—a heavy-duty model that would chew through just about anything. Feeling better now that he'd accomplished something, Harold carried the box up to the cash, admiring how well this teenager did her job. Maybe he'd been wrong not to insist that John get a part-time job. Maybe that was what he needed—to teach him some responsibility. And when Dylan turned sixteen, maybe he should work too. He and Audrey had both had part-time jobs in high school, and they'd turned out all right. But Audrey had been too concerned about their marks—it's so much harder for kids today, she'd said—and what was the result? Neither one of them was going into rocket science.

“I can take you over here,” the girl said, opening up an empty cash register when she saw the lineups at the others. Harold read the name on the girl's name tag and asked her, as she rang up his purchase, “Nula—if you don't mind my asking—how are your marks in school?”